I painted this during one of the the heat waves we had this year, I found it in one of the drying racks which are just dish racks, but work perfectly for keeping wet paintings separated. I have one rack for small paintings 5x7 to 8x10 and another for larger paintings 11x14 and up.
This started out as a practice piece to see if I could capture the barely recognizable tea bags sitting in the ice tea, then I became interested in the shadow and reflected light from the tea. I think I painted the lemon 3 or 4 times before it looked like a lemon.
The reason I found it is I periodically go thru paintings after they have been out of sight for a while and when I see them with fresh eyes the mistakes seem to stand out. I'll try to repaint them, if that doesn't work they get the gesso treatment. The paintings not good enough get coats of grey gesso made by mixing some black with the gesso, now I have panels ready for outdoor sketching, these plein air sketches capture the essence of the scene when painting on location. Recycling the panels like this also helps save money on buying panels for sketching.
